About ENDAPT
ENDAPT (Electronic Networking to Develop Accomplished Professional Teachers) supports William & Mary teacher preparation interns and alumnae through this Web site. ENDAPT’s primary purposes are to complement school-based mentoring for new teachers while helping our interns and graduates to further develop as teacher leaders by becoming active members of a national network of award-winning educators.
Some of ENDAPT’s mentor teachers are members of the Center for Teaching Quality’s Teacher Leaders Network (TLN). TLN brings together teacher leaders—many of them National Board Certified Teachers--from across the U.S., providing “a virtual gathering place” for those who wish to “advance teacher leadership in the classroom, the school, and the larger community.”
ENDAPT’s one-to-one online mentoring services provide personalized, "just in time" professional development. New teachers can receive individualized curriculum support while apprenticing online and over time with a senior colleague of their choice on matters of effective pedagogy. At the same time, new teachers can participate in established, active online communities (via
Tapped In) comprised of knowledgeable colleagues who teach in the same discipline and at similar grade levels, broadening their content- and process-related instructional repertoires by doing so.
ENDAPT’s design and functioning are based upon online mentoring research and practice that have been ongoing since 1993 in the Electronic Emissary Project and since 2000 in WINGS Online. Both of these telementoring efforts were originated by one of ENDAPT’s project coordinators. ENDAPT’s facilitation strategies are based upon online professional development for preservice and inservice teachers conducted by members of the project's staff. ENDAPT seeks also to extend and enhance the emerging practical and theoretical knowledge base about online mentoring by sharing the results of its ongoing evaluation and empirical research in publications and conference presentations.
In the decade+-old tradition of open source software, ENDAPT will make all Web-based code and best-practice implementation information available on-line to all teacher preparation programs at no charge. According to the specifications of the General Public License under which the code will be released, any teacher preparation organization that would like to offer its interns and graduates the services described above will be able to acquire, customize, and run all of the software that animates ENDAPT’s online services for new teachers.
